


The Naming and Unnaming of Green Things

by anahita



Series: The Land Of [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 10:18:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4133808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anahita/pseuds/anahita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You live, Capable said to Furiosa when she woke after her second amputation. </p><p>You live again, Furiosa murmured back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming and Unnaming of Green Things

Cheedo of the Sea

Once there was the sea. And then there wasn’t.  

Cheedo was stolen from a place her people called “the sea” even though the water had left, to go, her mother said, to a better place. The raiders drove a day, and a night, a day, another night, and a day before they stopped because Cheedo’s people were fearsome and unkind to thieves. They would look for her under the rocks and crannies of the old disappeared sea, its sandy dunes, its dry air, like they had looked for Theana, for Jean, for Rema, who were stolen by raiders the last year. It was no comfort to Cheedo as they drove her away from her home, as she opened her mouth to scream, and the ghost boys laughed at the idea of the reward they would get for her chrome skin, her mouth full of lovely teeth, her hair like night. 

Soon dust limed the inside of Cheedo’s throat and she rasped. They threw water at her. What a waste. She grew quiet and afraid. It was not their flight from Joe that made her brave. She was a little duck nestled in the other women’s breasts. She was their shadow. She was a lizard in their mouth. She was terrified until the end, wanting to hide, to run back to the known terrors of Joe, wanting to disappear into the sand. The work of escaping, of keeping each other safe, of working together engrossed her and soon she was throwing herself at it, throwing herself onto the danger, willing to throw herself away to save the others. 

When they returned to the Citadel with Joe’s body like a grim price, she was still afraid, still fragile. Like glass, Joe had said, tearing into her. But Joe was gone, torn up, and disappeared like the sea. She was someone new without him. Cheedo the old. Cheedo the new. The wretched called her Cheedo the brave.  

Capable is Capable

What are wives without a husband? Capable asked herself once they were back to the Citadel.They’d wanted to know and now they had the answer but they didn’t know what to call it. Were they widows? No. Were they mothers? Dag was almost one.Angharad had been a mother to them all but she was gone. They weren’t the Vulvalini, they weren’t war boys, they weren’t milk mothers, they weren’t the wretched. What’s in a name? Everything. 

Call me Capable, she said of herself, and she was. The first few months she ran around like there was a fire under her because there was. There was a fire under all of them, threatening to burn the place down, to drink their water down to dregs, to eat their greens, and use their bullets and guzzoline. How do you change a boy who loves death? How do you teach him to live? Capable cried herself to sleep every night thinking of her foolish war boy. But every morning she was running from crisis to crisis, grease under her nails, blood in her teeth, hammer in her hand.With her trademark goggles on, she was, she could be, capable of anything that life required of her. Life not death, she thought and tried to teach it to Nux’s little ghosts. 

You live, you live, and you die. 

The Splendid Dag

She gave birth to a little Warlord. What a shame. When the Keeper had told her it could be a girl, the Dag had known it for a lie but it had given her hope. The little Warlord thirsted for her milk. The little Warlord cried loudly, his healthy lungs bellowing, his mouth a pink chasm. The Dag disappeared for hours to tend her green things and left him with a defunct milk mother. They felt bereft without their work, as demeaning and as horrible as it had been. The Dag was disgusted by them. The Citadel craved its milk and the mothers craved their work. Now the mothers lay around, no better than the helpless wretched, and another food item was extinct. They all crowded the heights of the Citadel, because when the people had lifted up Furiosa, Furiosa had lifted up the people.  

Warlord, Warlord, please sleep. But he didn’t sleep for nights on end just like his father. Once she had almost thrown him out from a window but Furiosa had saved him, wrestled him from the Dag, and held him gently in her arms. The others tolerated him, were sometimes amused by him, rarely affectionate, but Furiosa loved him. She was fascinated by his perfect hands, his perfect feet, his crooked spine. She spent all the time she could with him. It was only later when he was a year old and his spinal defect could not be ignored that the Dag felt the first stirring of pity in her heart. Poor boy, poor Warlord, her little son.  

And then a flood of love over the next few years changed the Dag forever. She had been a mother to her green things, she became a mother to a boy, and then a mother to a people. She had hated how the wretched looked to her little Warlord with hope in their eyes after Corpus Colossus fell to his death the year after Joe’s death, a death that had been heading Corpus Colossus’ way for a long time. The people of the Citadel thought a man should rule them because it had been that way for as long as they remembered. They had chosen a little boy as small as a forearm, too little to speak, hunchbacked and unable to walk. He was a slow growing thing, decades to completion. The women ruled in peace. They would change the way their people thought of rulers, of the ruled, before the Dag’s son was full grown.

Toast the Unknowing 

Toast liked puzzles. She put together the war games the warriors played instead of raiding, she looked at old maps and compiled new ones using information taken from passing strangers, from Furiosa’s scouts, from changes she observed herself on brief expeditions to the surroundings. She wanted to know what the world looked like now but she also wanted to know what the world had looked like once. The Dag’s little Warlord sat next to her sometimes and helped her trace lines into papyrus. They called him Bean when they were alone and he called himself the Bean after his mother. The Bean was a restless little imp even though he could not walk. He hated sitting still and would drag himself around using his hands; his thin legs dangling behind him. Toast was the only one who could keep him occupied. She set up riddles for him, brain teasers, they made up new languages together from dead ones.If she could she would protect him from himself; staring out from the heights, going to the very edge of the Citadel on his hands and arms, the Bean was always a step from falling. If they put him in his wheelchair, he rolled away like it was a motorbike. 

Toast set out to the Bullet Farm. They said they had a man waiting who had been to the ocean. The journey was uneventful, the Rig familiar, the desert a companion. No new nightmares on the horizon, just old ones. The man she had travelled all the way to the Bullet Farm to see turned out to be mad as Max. Barely human. She spent a day coaxing ten words from him. She wished she had Furiosa with her. Furiosa had a way with the mad ones. At night a little animal burrowed into her side. She woke up with a start to find Bean had snuck along on the journey, hidden at the bottom like they had once to escape his father. Toast was sad. Was Bean escaping like they had escaped the Citadel? She knew it could be a prison.  

At dawn she tried to get the mad one to come back to the Citadel with them. The more she tried the more agitated he become until he was primed for demolition. That’s when the Bean snuck up on him, barely five, trusting of those around him because they had been careful only to surround him with trustworthy people. The mad one grabbed him with a hand around his thin neck. How easy it would be for him to snap it, Toast thought afraid. It was no thicker than a twig. Please, she begged, though she had promised herself to beg no man ever again. Please, she begged, though she had promised to never beg for a man’s life. Bean the boy, Bean her friend’s son, the son of a tyrant, the seedling that would grow to be a man someday, if he lived. Please, she said, and gentled her hands, her voice, her eyes. The Bean was thrown safely into her arms, a little bomb, and she was so glad that he lived.

Furiosa of the Fury Road 

Furiosa lost her left leg six years after Immortan Joe’s death. She so wished they could mark the passage of time some other way, some new way. She wished she could mark her life some way other than through the falling off of her limbs. At sixteen she had run away from those who had stolen her and tried to get back to the Green Place. She had lost her arm as punishment. She had waited ten silent years and tried again and they had made her lose her mind. She had crawled out of the hole of her madness using an arm and two legs. Began again. At thirty four she had tried once more, only to find madness at the end, in a marsh that had once been home. Sometimes she woke up panting from a nightmare where she had been a hybrid creature, walking on stilts through that dead marshland, bent forward, a crow of the wetlands. 

It happened in an instant. She was at the head of a cavalcade, like old times, driving the rig beyond its endless endurance, driving herself beyond her own, admittedly, almost endless endurance. Survive. That was all. She just had to survive. It was her, the Rig, her warriors, against the desert, against the horde of crazed slavers following them. Furiosa had to get them all back to the heights of the Citadel, its safety, its impregnability. And then let the slavers break their backs on her walls.  

One of the slavers scrapped the Rig’s side with his tanker. He shouted something that Furiosa ignored. He was jittering, high on a drug his kind lived on, but his hands were steady as he aimed at her head. She moved the Rig towards him and they collided together. Another tanker came on her other side and they squeezed her between until she felt the Rig heaving under the strain. How long could it take this battering? They had already been too many days on the run, without rest, and still half a day from home. She increased her speed and, impossibly, ran through the tankers to the clean open air of the desert night. The children shouted their joy from where they hid. Almost, she thought, and a dwarfish slaver jumped in though the window and blew her leg off. 

It happened so fast, she barely had time to control the wheel jerking under her suddenly slack fingers, barely had time to blink the sweat from her eyes, and the children had crawled over the slaver with their little knives, their hands, their teeth. They tore him apart as she blinked.  

She got them all back to the Citadel. They cut off her leg. The stolen children, gone barely a month from the Citadel before Furiosa brought them back home, had changed so much that Furiosa knew she had failed them anyway. It was not the leg she missed. She was made half of metal now, just as she had always imagined herself. She was part mechanical, part flesh, part dead, part mad. She was more honest than she had ever been. But the children. They were murderers, mostly grown, never to return. 

You live, Capable said to her when she woke after her second amputation.  

You live again, Furiosa murmured back. 

Mad Max 

Max sat watching the frenzied fires the lizard people burned on the edge of the badlands. They had fashioned tails from metal, the flesh of dead men and women, and wore the heads of their enemies down their backs like the spines of amphibians. They worshipped the sand dunes. The flesh of lizards was forbidden to them. They ate people instead. 

Max hadn’t spoken to another person in many months. The last words he’s said were to the empty air, to the wine-colored sky, to his bike. He’d said them in his head so he didn’t know if it counted. He had the wild urge to walk up to the lizard people and eat a lizard in front of them.He lived on the critters of the desert but the critters lived on him too. He carried them on his skin as he drove, they nestled in his hair, crawled up his leg.  

He’d been watching the lizard people light fires for days. They had his car. He wanted it back but he also didn’t want to be eaten and so he waited for them to sleep. But they never slept. Maybe sleeping was forbidden to them too. He was as mesmerized by the sight of the V8 Interceptor as the lizard people were by their fires. He tried to remember where he’d last seen his car. It had been wrongfully taken, wrongfully driven, crushed at the hands of usurpers. Here it was resurrected.  

Give it back, he growled at the wasteland. Give me what’s mine.  

It murmured softly back. 

They finally collapsed in big heap like snakes in a pit. The night was alive as alive as Max who crept through the lizard men and women like they were really critters of the desert. I will crunch you between my teeth, he thought and crawled through the open window of his car. His hands remembered what he had forgotten and they tore wires apart until the car growled under him.  

Max drove out of the badlands with the dawn at his back, the light, the fires of the lizard people, their hunger for his flesh. He circled back until he was facing them and then he drove over them until they scattered around him like dust. Sometimes survival wasn’t _enough_. Max madly wanted more than to survive. To live. To thrive.

If his car could be resurrected than maybe he could be too. 

**Author's Note:**

> Stand-alone but might become part of a bigger work. Unbetaed. 
> 
> Thank you for reading :)


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